No need for radaway here
by NCR Ranger
Summary: If you told someone of the Mojave there there's a place where clean water flows, and radiation doesn't exsist, they'd call you out. But, they haven't been to Zion,then.


Somewhere in Zion National Park

10:00am

* * *

It was right on the tip of Rose of Sharon Cassidy's tongue to say something, well, _typical,_ for her right now. As in, something that most folks, even in a post-nuclear holocuast, hellscape of a world, would call " profanity ", or " bad language ", etc.

The thing was, that didn't usualy faze her. She'd been a foul mouthed person for most of her adult life; cussing had been more of a form of vocabulay for her and the rest of the Cassidy family, growing up as vertible tribals way out in the former hippie land that was California. It was even more unsurprisng when you considered that they lived within a few miles of the capital of excessive profanity itself: Marine Base San Diego.

Combining that with how everyday life was about contending with mortal threats from everything from the hellspawn known as Deathclaws, to the riff-raff scum eaters known as the Jackal Gang, they were all cussing before their 16th birthdays. It was a fact of existance, in which, said existance involved so much dust that some of it got in your teeth, taking well-drawn water baths in metal buckets, and handing a .22 rifle as a matter of course.

All of that hardship granted, though, they nonetheless wound up policing their own speech- even while ducking under raider bullets and hunkering down against dust devils. They weren't throwing around all that profanity for no reason at all, of course; they said them when they _fit_ into a sentence. To help _punctuate_, to use the proper academic term.

Granted, Cass might've taken more of those oppritunites to " fit " them in than she shoudlv'e, but up until now, she'd thought nothing of it.

But, " now " was diffrerent.

Different, in a way she hadn't ever seen before. At the moment, she was standing nowhere _near _where she'd grown up in Calinornia. The former hippie state seemed very far away now.

It didn't look anything like here. Like_ Zion._

_California- _and with it, most of the Core region- was raw desert. There was nothing that _grew_ there- well, nothing aside from clumps and patches of shrubs and bushes, virtually of which were nasty with thorns. You wouldn't find and grass, either, not even the dead tan kind. As for trees, those were also on the " virtually non existant " list as well. What pinch-full Cass had ever come across had been the thin, gnarled kind that didn't get very tall. It was about as far from the sprawling forests of " Redwood " trees that some Pre- Nuclear Bomb ghouls had once told her about.

Said nuclear bombs had been quite through in cleaning the land of life.

It'd come back, but in about 1/8th the strength of what'd it had been like. All the dead flora aside, there was the wretched radiation- or " rads ", as denizens of the wasteland called it. The ghostly energy had settled down all over the place, mostly where the epicenter of a 200- year old, thermonuclear nuke gone off ( needless to say ), but also where _anything_ that'd had nuclear matieral in it had been blown up. You couldn't see it, taste it, hear it, or realize it was around in any way, _unless_ you had a geiger counter. Then you'd hear that chilling _clkk, cllck, clck _which told you " Get the **** _out_ of here, you noob ! You're going to get cooked from the inside out otherwise ! "

So, anything that lived through the bombs, or had come back after them, now had the chance to die anyway from the invisible death. Even taking a sip of water from any scource could be bascially drinking death.

But, all of that- _all of that_\- was not out here. It was not _Zion._

_" My God. Look _at this place."

She said it by sheer instinct. No concious thought; it was simply the first thing that came out of her mouth.

Standing on the lip of the vertical descent, the freckled, redheaded caravan woman had a grandstand view of a large swath of the ex-National Park.

The ground wasn't pure sand , like the Core Region. It was, well, actual dirt. _Soil, _and it wasn't the tan color that the Mojave sand was. This ground was_ orange_, and even a few shades of _pink_. In the Mojave, everything was tan. Or, the dull charcoal color of all the Pre-bomb metalwork that was left over- the bits of it that hadn't rusted out by now.

Said ground was all cliffs, ravines, and gullies too- nothing at all like the Mojave. The whole landscapr was craggy, rising and falling. Some areas were carved apart by deep sided gouges in the Earth, with rivers and creeks flowing across the bottom of them. That alone got Cass' attention- the only source of clean, rad-free water in the Mojave was Lake Mead.

She couldn't remember ever seeing a river/stream/ creek before, though.

Everything looked so, _alive. _There were trees here, _real_ and healthy looking trees. Not the spindly, hardscrabble things found in the Mojave. Not enough of them to be a forest, but more than Cass was used to seeing. They actually had _bark_ on their trunks.

None of this had been was Cass had been expecting when Derek- the man that the Mojave as a whole knew as The Courier- had taken her on this trip.

She'd been expecting nothing more than a long hike across lots of wasteland, with an abundance of heat, thirst, and all the usual trappings of the post nuclear world. The only excitement came when they were jumped by the occasional 80's tribals, and Jackal gangsters. _That_ had been familar to Cass; cutting them down with blasts from her 12g shotgun ( or at least, the ones that somehow managed to have survied long enough to get anywhere near her. Derek's Galil rifle did a masterful job of taking out most of them from a distance. ) was old hat. She'd been fighting of the likes of them for years now. It was cleaning up the wasteland, one Viper gangbanger by gangbanger.

That's pretty much what she thought the whole trip would be like: They'd wander northward, they'd have the satisfaction to have wiped out some raiders, and then they'd arrive at some kind of pre-bomb cache of technology/ supplies, weapons, etc, that Derek had learned about for them to loot. The name Zion hadn't held any signifigance to her.

Even if Derek had told her. Which he hadn't. Which, now that they'd arrived, Cass was sure had been done so she'd get her first impression on her own terms.

_Well, color me impressed. This place actually doesn't put me on edge, like walking around Westside does._

She turned to look at him now, and found while she'd been watching the land, he'd been watching her.

Well, more like noting her reaction to the grand vista ( 7 and 10 are better ) before them.

The tall, goatee-sporting, duster wearing man was leaning against one of the orange rock walls, arms crossed, a slight smirk on his face. His wide brimmed cowboy hat was pushed back a bit, and his favorite Galil was slung over his back. On his hip holster was the Ranger Sequoia Elephant-hunting revolver the NCR had given him as a reward for his actions at Hoover dam- along with making him an honorary Ranger.

He looked like, though, a mercenary. Or a big game hunter. Or, someone who spent all their days on the road. Which was fitting, because as a courier, that's exactly what he _had_ done.

But, Cass got the impression now, that he was coming home, to Zion, in some kind of way.

" Enjoying the view. ". Derek said to her. But, he didn't say it like a question. He didn't need to.

He knew she was.

_Smartass._

_" _You're not blaming me, are you ? ". Cass waved an arm out toward the unspoiled expanse of Zion. " When has any wasteland kid seen anything like this ? Its not like nukes didn't fall like rain all over the whole country. "

Derek followed where her hand had pointed, jaw moving around in thought.

" America is gone ", he stated after a moment. He sounded a bit melechony, like it was something he missed. Cass didn't fully understand his facination with the lost world- hadn't that been where the bombs came from ? - but she cared about him enough to not say anything.

She'd followed him all the way out here, after all. There was something special going on.

" But, the land it was built on ? You can find places where the bombs didn't hit. ", Derek continued.

He pushed off the wall, walking up beside Cass. Without missing a beat, he slipped an arm around her.

Cass didn't fight the pleasant tingling sensation that ran up her spine.

" That's why I wanted you to see this place. Sure, I know you're a city kid. So am I; Most of the countryside is either boring and empty, or a deathtrap. But, Zion is special. "

" I can't say why, but it is. "

Laughing, Cass let her head rest on his shoulder.

" What- you want to wander off into the _mountains ? _Where, like in Washington state ? "

" Mountains ?! ", Dereke exclaimed, with half-serious shock, but also chuckling.

" What use could I have for mountains ? ".


End file.
